Wed, 22 Mar 2006

Children's earliest words stem from what interests them

No shit! I guess this explains why your yearling typically talks about "Mama", "Dada" and "baaddle" rather than the impending nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula... but wait, there's even more stupidity:

"The exciting thing is that a lot of people weren't even sure that 10-month-olds were paying attention," she [co-author Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D.] said. But this study shows that not only are they paying attention, they're actually learning words.

Any parent could've told these folks that all children of all ages pay careful attention to their environments: it's called the survival instinct, and it's far more noteworthy when it fails (as in accidents) than when it operates successfully (which is most of the time). I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted on this, and how many more worthy studies and projects died on the vine from lack of funding because somebody decided to pay these professional fools to hold forth on the obvious.

A recent study has found that younger babies learn words for new objects based on how interested they are in the object. Older babies attach more importance to whether the speaker is interested in the object. The study was conducted with 10-month-old babies. These findings suggest that parents should talk more about what their babies are interested in rather than what they, the parents, are interested in.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

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